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Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Benjamin Smith
Benjamin Smith
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

This article develops a theory of single-party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes. The strength of the opposition and rent scarcity during party consolidation, it argues, structure the choices available to elites as they decide how to build a support base. A weak opposition and ready access to rents makes a low-cost consolidation possible, but these conditions provide little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization; this trajectory generates weak single-party rule that is likely to collapse in a crisis. Conversely, elites who face a powerful opposition and scarce rents have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy-making and have powerful incentives to build a strong and broad-based party organization. Ruling parties that emerge from initial conditions like these prove more resilient during later crises. The author conducts an initial test of the argument against paired comparisons of Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania and of Indonesia and the Philippines.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , April 2005 , pp. 421 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2005

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References

1 Barbara Geddes, “Authoritarian Breakdown: Empirical Test of a Game Theoretic Argument” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, September 2–5,1999).

2 To gauge relative longevity rates within the single-party “family,” I estimated the same basic logit models discussed below but included only variants of single-party rule. None of the variants proved significantly more or less durable than others, so it is appropriate to include all of the variants in a sample. The regimes data used here are the original work and property of Barbara Geddes.

3 Indeed, Marcos's Philippines between 1978 and 1986—more than half, and the last eight, of the regime's fourteen years—ranks as a single-party regime on seven of thirteen measures to my mind, using Geddes' coding criteria. In her language, it settled into single-party hybrid status during these years. Coding for the Marcos regime is available from the author.

4 Although these are cross-sectional time-series data, Geddes conducted the analysis for her 1999 article using standard logit models. I tested for temporal sensitivity using Stata 7.0's xtlogit command and found no significant change in the results. Thus, I have retained her use of standard logistic regression and otherwise have used the same models and methods. One minor difference is that I coded the Middle East and North Africa as a single region.

5 The monarchy data are the original work and property of Jason Brownlee.

6 Because of the lack of a regime failure in Mexico between 1950 and 1992, including a dummy for the regime produced a perfect prediction of lack of failure and Stata 7.0's logit and xtlogit commands dropped all of Mexico's observations. And, because PWT data are missing for the USSR in 1991, the regime's collapse in that year does not appear in the models, so the USSR's observations are dropped as well.

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37 The Indonesian government had engineered a domestic timber boom in the late 1960s so that timber sales grew dramatically. However, only in 1970, with the enactment of a series of laws aimed at centralizing the industry and tying it closely to the regime, did the government accomplish what it had hoped to politically: turning the timber industry into a well-controlled source of political rents. See Ross, Michael, Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press 2001), 167–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, David, “Why Governments Fail to Capture Economic Rent: The Unofficial Appropriation of Rain Forest Rent by Rulers in Insular Southeast Asia between 1970–1999” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2001), 124–29Google Scholar.

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57 The MNLF grew in strength, however, during the first few years of martial law, and by 1975 had forced the regime to the negotiating table, the result of which was a cease-fire granting autonomy to Muslim areas in the southern Philippines and large-scale co-optation of MNLF leaders into the regime's patronage circles. See Thompson (fn. 56), 61–63.

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